Day 7

Our plan for today was to drive the hour or so across the border, surrender what's left of our fruit and vegie supply, then head on into Eucla 13km into the WA border and restock.  Well... it turns out that I misinterpreted the guide book and that Eucla doesn't in fact stock any food supplies other than icecreams, defrosted frozen milk and packets of lollies. Mmm... nutritious.  We still have plenty of meat and a few tinned or dehydrated vegies, so that should keep us going for a few more days yet.

There were a few things around Eucla that we wanted to see, so we set up camp early at the caravan park there.  For us it was 11am, but really in WA it was 9am.  In actual fact, Eucla has given the city the big middle finger and said "stuff you, we're thousands of kilometres east of Perth, so we're adopting our own local time".  So just to make things ultra confusing the real time in Eucla was 9:45. Why not just call it an even hour ahead of Perth??  Why just 45 minutes?  Doesn't matter anyway, we're operating by sun-up and sun-down anyway. 

After we set up camp we went for a short drive down to the ruins of the old Eucla Telegraph Station.  Note to self: Do not build a house next to sand dunes, or you'll be forever sweeping the floor... and the walls... and the ceiling.  I couldn't resist myself and we let the tyres down to drive on the sand track down to the beach where the old jetty is and then have a drive along the beach.  Got to the jetty and the ocean greeted us at the entrance to the beach - it was well and truly high tide.  So much for beach driving here. 

With all afternoon left to spend we decided to go check out Weebubbie Cave.  This cave was featured on an episode of Catalyst earlier this year, and is known for it's underwater lakes and cave diving.  It's not open to the public anymore, and with good reason - you would need some serious abseiling/rock climbing gear and experience just to get to the bottom of the 10m drop into the cave floor and entrance.  Our understanding was that entering the cave was closed to the public, but viewing the cave entrance (the big hole in the ground) was not.  It's still a mighty impressive hole in the ground.

On the 250 thou map sheet there's also Weebubbie Road Blowhole marked just off the road a few kms from the cave, so we went in search of that.  There were no obvious signs or tracks directing where the blowhole would be, so we followed a pair of wheel marks off into the bush to the point marked on the map.  Still couldn't find it, so we made tracks back to the road and back to Eucla.

The last half of the afternoon (which was really only a couple of hours) was spent relaxing at camp. 

Have you ever seen the sun set at 5:57 in Australia?  We were in bed by 6:30... how sad.